The Adat Community’s Resistance to Marine Grabbing in Benoa Bay, Bali

¹ Department of History, Faculty of Humanities, Universitas Diponegoro, Indonesia
² Research Center for Social and Cultural, National Research and Innovation Agency, Indonesia

^* Corresponding author: slamet.subekti@live.undip.ac.id

Abstract

This paper presents an environmental history of the successful resistance movement, ForBALI (Forum Rakyat Bali Tolak Reklamasi Teluk Benoa), against the large-scale reclamation of Benoa Bay, Bali. It situates the conflict within the longstanding historical processes of marine grabbing in Indonesia, where state and corporate actors systematically enclose and appropriate coastal commons. The analysis centers on the agency of the Adat Community, arguing that its victory was predicated on a strategic, historically-informed pivot from a fragmented, issue-based opposition to a unified mass movement defending Balinese cultural identity and sacred geography. Utilizing Anthony Giddens' Structuration Theory, this study examines the contestation between the state, investors, and the community as a dynamic interplay of agency and structure. It demonstrates how the movement's leaders consciously activated the deep-seated cultural structure of the desa adat (customary village) and the religious authority of sacred sites, effectively weaponizing Balinese historical memory and cosmological beliefs. This cultural mobilization created a coalition that was politically potent and culturally unassailable. Concurrently, the movement fortified its moral arguments with a rigorous environmental-historical analysis of the bay's hydro-ecological functions, modeling the catastrophic risks of altered tidal dynamics on water quality, mangrove ecosystems, and urban flooding. The case concludes that ForBALI's success represents a definitive moment of structural transformation in Indonesian environmental politics, where agency, channeled through cultural and environmental historical narratives, successfully altered the legal and political structures governing coastal space. The Benoa Bay case offers a replicable model for anti-dispossession movements worldwide, demonstrating the power of synthesizing cultural resilience with scientific and historical advocacy to achieve environmental justice.